When you want your hot sauce to do more than bring the heat, you need a bottle of this.

Summer is high season for food carts in New York. You’ve got the syrup-soaked shaved ice in the Lower East Side, the red-hot fried shrimp in deep Brooklyn, and the smoke-enrobed charcoal-grilled skewers in Chinatown. Me? I’m all about the fruit stands you see in NYC’s Hispanic neighborhoods, the kind that are loaded down with sliced and bagged mangoes. They're a completely delicious snack all by themselves, but the vendors are armed with a secret weapon to super-charge their flavor. In the condiment caddy attached to the carts, you'll often see cartoon-shellacked liter bottles filled with a viscous-looking hot sauce.

That is chamoy, a fruity and savory hot sauce. And that, dear reader, is perfect on those mangos.

Chamoy sauce is a fermented sweet, salty, and spicy Mexican condiment that’s about as thick as Sriracha, but far less pain-inducing. There’s a lot of different takes on it depending on manufacturer, but every single drop is simultaneously spicy, salty, sweet, and sour, making it the kind of sauce that gets all of your taste buds moving.

Just like sour, tangy Japanese umeboshi plums, chamoy starts out by pickling fruit (in this case, apricots, plums, or mangoes) in salt or salt brine—sometimes with a dose of vinegar, too. The sweet-sour liquid that results gets spiced up with plenty of chile powder, and sometimes thickened with more fruit puree.

Do like the fruit carts do, and drizzle chamoy sauce on fresh mango slices and add a squeeze of lime juice and a sprinkling of salt to kick that fruit snack into overdrive, much like you would with a sprinkle of chile powder (peaches work great, too). You can use it to make a tangier take on a Michelada, or as a marinade for your next al Pastor marinade. It’s also really fantastic in a mango-lime smoothie, which is called a chamoyada in Mexico. Pour a few tablespoons in the bottom of a large glass, give the glass a swirl to coat the sides. Pour in your standard mango smoothie and take in the beauty of the swirl life.